Tag Archives: life

Playing with the Butterflies of Good News

Well, our house will have to have some major repairs to retain insurance because we live in the southern part of Tornado Alley. Climate change has greatly increased our ability to have all our possessions wiped out overnight. And having to pay for the replacement of the entire house is bad for the insurance company’s ongoing ability to make huge profits off of our large monthly premiums. I am so sad for them. Especially since they are putting this pressure on to gain an excuse for canceling our insurance while retaining all previously paid premiums.

I didn’t die last night, however. And the high winds warning is set to expire in two more hours from writing this particular sentence. Big Bad Wolf hasn’t yet huffed and puffed hard enough to blow our house down. So, maybe I am good and things are generally good.

I have overcome my health problems too for the moment. The urinary tract infection I thought I had is not there anymore. I am not following the Jim Henson Road to Death… for now at least. The doctor did give me a final medication to stop the burning sensation that fooled me into thinking I was going to die. Humorously, it turns my pee blue.

I do have to pay taxes as soon as Spring Break is over. And the probability that the Trump Tax Cut, the gift that keeps on taking things away, will increase the amount of taxes the parasites known as retired teachers have to pay. I am almost at the point once again where I can’t afford to pay what more I will owe and will have to beg the government for monthly payments.

And when this week is over, my family, who left me behind on the Spring Break Trip to see Number Two Son at his Air Force base, will return so that I am no longer the only living thing left in the house (besides a handful of Norway rats and roof rats as well as at least two ghost dogs.) They didn’t leave me behind because they don’t like me very much, but because I had at least one doctor’s appointment to attend, partial dentures being made for me to chew tough foods with (like tapioca pudding,) and the fact that my arthritis prevents me from doing a car trip from Texas to Washington DC with any degree of comfort and an ability walk once we get there.

Everything is good news now. Times are at least better than they were.

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Return of the Train Man

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I was an aficionado of HO model trains as a kid.  I continued that horrendous fixation with 1/78th scale worlds long into my extended juvenile immaturity (I was an unmarried teacher of middle school students until 1995.)    Even after I was married, my wife allowed me, to a very limited degree, to continue to be a train man.

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I spent a good deal of time over the years building plastic model kits of buildings, painting and repainting plaster model buildings, and collecting engines, rolling stock, and trackside details.  Painting little 1/78th scale people is definitely an exercise for steady hands and a zen-like, highly focused mind.

But that all reached an impasse when we moved to the Dallas area.  I had to tear down my train layout, box up my trains, and put everything on hold until I had another place to build and create my HO model-train world.  So, while it was all boxed up and transported to first, a house that we rented from my brother-in-law, and then a house that we bought, it got shifted around and stacked inappropriately, and grandma put some really heavy items on top to crush and mangle my treasures.  It also spent a night outside in the rain when my brother-in-law’s water heater had to be replaced in the garage where everything was stored.  I was not a happy camper for a while.

Now, a decade later, I am still taking the tiny items and trying to glue the pieces back together.  I have basically given up trying to get the trains to run again.  But I can use the bits and pieces of Toonerville to make pictures like these.  It makes the art-parts of my psyche and soul a little happier.

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Old number 99 had to have the front part where the headlamp is located reattached and restored.  It gave me something to do this weekend while I was down with a bad back and breathing difficulties.  It would be neat to put the train table back together and get things set up once again, but there is no space, and no unlimited funds, and less and less time.  So for now, the train man comes back to me to rebuild in photographs and in my imagination.

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Filed under artwork, autobiography, humor, photo paffoonies, Trains

The Survivor

Elf on Patrol

I am trying to bounce back.  Yesterday I survived the possible end of the world.  No heart attack.  No asteroid hitting the Earth.  But also no writing contest win.  A huge delay in the publication of my novel.  My writing world is in danger of expiring because my life is winding down to its finale, and I’m running out of time.  I can still do it, though.  I have come back from down and out before.

In 1983, I had a mole removed from my face.  It wasn’t a vanity-type thing.  Removing it wasn’t going to cure ugliness or anything.  But it had gotten larger and had a strange color change.  So, my ancient and doddering Czechoslovakian doctor removed it just to be sure.  As with any such removal, the excised tissue was sent to the lab for analysis.  Malignant melanoma in the very first stages.  At the time, the survival rate for such a cancer in Texas was less than fifty percent.  However, most cases were not discovered so early in the crisis.  I went back in for more surgery.  They ended up cutting a hole through my right cheek and stitching it back together again.  The new tissue underwent very close scrutiny, and it was determined that all the dangerous cells had been removed during the very first surgery.  No evidence anywhere of a creeping metastasizing cancer death.  It was decided that chemotherapy would only do harm and would not help anything.  So I got to keep my hair.  It eventually meant removing two more moles and three lumps, but they were all benign.  Cancer was fought off and beaten 42 years ago this month.  I am a cancer survivor.

I often marvel at the fact that I am still alive and still able to write.  I have had innumerable near misses.  Car accidents that didn’t happen by a matter of inches.  The skidding truck on the icy street in Iowa City missed the front tire of my bicycle by about three inches.  Facing down irrationally angry youths with weapons intending to strike out in anger, and somehow having the right words to calm them and prevent the tragedy.  One of them told me it was because he looked me in the eye and saw no fear there that he couldn’t do it, couldn’t strike me down.  By rights, I should be dead.  It is a supreme irony of life that an almost-atheist like me believes in guardian angels.

I don’t know what the ultimate goal is.  I don’t expect to be a wealthy published novelist like Stephen King.  I don’t know if it is even important that I break through the bookstore barriers and get my work on the shelves for a few paltry dollars.  It is really only important that I write.  This blog has become important to me because I have developed a small readership that actually reads and provides feedback.  I do occasionally reach the hearts of people I don’t even know.  And I have made friends and relatives a little bit misty.  I have written 849 posts, posting every single day of 2015 and every single day of fifteen months in a row.  I have written six complete novels and gotten two into print with an ISBN number and everything.  My writing, like me myself, exists, and it will survive.  I am a survivor.

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Dumb Times Get Really Dumb

The past two months have been a rollercoaster in the dark in a rail car that is barely set properly on the tracks. Every curve I didn’t see coming was a potential derailment and crash. A potential fatal crash.

President Pumpkinhead has been crashing and destroying government services left and right. My Medicare (which I am still paying increasingly high premiums for) is at risk of being totally cut, as is the Medicaid and Social Security that people more poverty stricken than me may lose. The military leadership has been overturned for less competent and lower-ranking officers who are more Pumpkinhead-friendly. The Department of Justice is now set up to unleash a revenge campaign, firing politically neutral officers, judges, and lawyers for less competent and more wishy-washy ones. Will they come for me? Probably not for a while. Big list. But eventually.

And my health woes have taken a darker turn. A broken crown that turned into a dangerously infected broken molar had to be extracted, along with a second broken molar. I ended up with a large dental bill that the dentist’s office tried to help me finance resulting in a credit denial that will stick me with a large bill I cannot pay. That started at the beginning of January and is finishing in the credit denial today. I also had a second serious infection of my urinary tract that required the heaviest possible antibiotics I could take without dying. That was overlapping some sort of flu-like virus and the passing of two, or possibly four, kidney stones. I am floored with lifeforce fully spent… but not quite dead.

Could any of this have been avoided? Any of this dumb stuff? I voted for the nice black lady who took over from the really old but really good President. So did my daughter. We didn’t want the Pumpkinhead to win. And I really would’ve liked Medicare to help me pay for necessary dental work, but you apparently have to fill out a long form by a certain date back in October as explained in a letter I never got in September. I have no idea where the other dumb stuff came from or how it could’ve been prevented.

So, I am now done complaining about all this dumb stuff. I will probably survive it. Maybe not. But probably. It would depend on where the rail car actually went off the rails resulting in a fatal crash I didn’t yet learn about.

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Doomscroll for no Gain

I had a terrible month in January. The dentist, in love with causing pain, yanked an infected and broken molar out of my head. The procedure lasted more than an hour beyond the usual time. That by itself put me out of business for January. But, two weeks into the month, my wife brought home a strain of regular flu from her teaching job and gave it to me. And as the flu was ending two weeks later, I passed at least two, and maybe four, kidney stones. Which immediately led to a severe urinary tract infection that had me taking the strongest antibiotic I have ever taken in my life. A fly tried to land on the top of my head. It immediately fell to the floor dead. The antibiotic was that strong. Now, tomorrow, it starts again. The dentist will yank out another broken molar on the other side of my stupid head.

So, I have been laid up and unable to do anything but draw, watch tv, and doomscroll.

The butterfly picture is loosely based on a photo of a spicebush swallowtail butterfly, turning brown into yellow for a very bumblebee vibe. the other two drawings were straight-up doodles drawn from a picture in my stupid brain. All three were enhanced by AI Mirror before publication. Arthritis in the fingers, you know.

But the doom-scrolling thing is an exercise in horror and crushing pains from liberal levels of empathy. Canadians are shocked and horrified that the Pumpkinhead President has declared economic warfare on them with 25% tariffs on everything imported from Canada. He also has the Danish President and the Mexican President preparing for war and trying desperate negotiations to turn away Pumpkin’s wrath.

I got to see a panicky little Hispanic girl crying and pleading because she came home from school to find that ICE had taken both her parents as undocumented immigrants. She was homeless and defenseless. And cruel white people who consider themselves superior to this little girl talked about how her parents got what they deserved for being criminals.

Make no mistake about it. Immigrants are NOT criminals. Being in this country without documents is a civil misdemeanor. The immigration system throws huge roadblocks in the way of immigrants who have the bad sense to choose to live in the wrong colored skin. My wife is an immigrant from the Philippines. After we were married, she lived in this country via green card for more than 25 years. That’s how hard it is unless you are from someplace white like Norway or England or Russia. At any point along the way she could have lost the green card for some technicality, and then she would’ve been in the same situation as the Hispanic girl’s parents. My kids have birthright citizenship like the Bozo in Chief has promised to de-citizenize.

He plans to do away with the Department of Education completely.

I find myself, as an atheist, praying to God after every doom-scrolling session that Pumpkinheads can have fatal strokes or heart attacks. And that a magic couch that can take revenge will eat the VP whole. And that the Speaker of the House sees a porn site on his son’s computer, which makes his flattop head explode. (That, of course, won’t kill him. Cockroaches can live without a head for weeks until they starve to death because they no longer have a mouth.)

I need to stop doom-scrolling.

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People All Have Worth

2nd Doctor  I know that you are probably immediately listing all the reasons that my title is totally wacky monkey-thinking in your head.  And if you want to lay into me in the comments, you are more than welcome.  But the reality is that teachers have to develop the mindset that all kids can learn and all people have value… no matter what.  That can be hard to accept when you factor in how corrupted, warped, and badly-taught so many people have turned out to be.  It honestly seems, sometimes, that when faced with the facts of how people act… being violent, or greedy, self-centered, thoughtless, un-caring, and willfully stupid… that they really don’t even have value to others if you kill them, let them rot, and try to use them as fertilizer.  The plants you fertilize with that stuff will come up deformed.

But the Doctor I have pictured here, the Second Doctor played by Patrick Troughton always seemed to find Earth people delightful.  Alien people too, for that matter, unless they were soulless mobile hate receptacles in robotic trash cans like the Daleks, or mindless machines powered by stolen human brains like the Cybermen.  There is, indeed, music in every soul, even if some of it is a little bit discordant and awkward.  And people are not born evil.  The classic study done on Brazilian street kids showed that even with no resources to share and living empty, hopeless lives, the children helped one another, comforted one another, and refused to exploit one another.  As a teacher you get to know every type that there is.  And there are stupid kids (deprived of essential resources necessary to learning), and evil kids (lashing out at others for the pain inflicted upon them), and needy kids (who can never get enough of anything you might offer and always demand more, MORE, MORE!)  Sometimes they drive you insane and make you want to resign and leave the country to go count penguins in Antarctica.  But the Doctor is right.  No matter what has been done to them, if you get to know them, and treat them as individual people rather than as problems… they are delightful!  Andrew

So let me show you a few old drawings of people.

Cute people like Andrew here.

Or possibly stupid and goofy people who never get things right.

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Or long-dead people who made their contributions long ago, and sacrificed everything to make our lives different… if not better.DSCN4448

Supe n Sherry_nOr young people who live and learn and hopefully love…

And try really hard at whatever they do… whether they have talent or not.

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And hope and dream and play and laugh…

And sometimes hate… (but hopefully not too much)…

And can probably tell that I really like to draw people…

Because God made them all for a reason…

even if we will never find out what that reason is.

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What You Should Know About Filipino Families

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Not everyone pictured in this post is actually a family member by marriage, but my wife has a big family and everyone who is even remotely related to a Filipino family… or even imagines that they are… is family.

I am about as much of a white-guy WASP-type as you can find in Middle America, having grown up in Iowa and teaching for my entire career in Texas.  But I know a thing or two… or three about other cultures.   I taught in South Texas for 23 years with students who were over 85% Spanish-speaking.  And then, in 1995, I married into the Pinoy culture of the Philippine Islands.

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Me and my Filipino-American familia… circa 2003.

There are some things I have learned about this other culture that you should probably be aware of.

#1.  The United States is being invaded and colonized by the Philippines.  They are coming here in waves, getting jobs in education and medicine that not enough of home-grown America are willing to take up.  My wife came here with a placement company as a teacher.  Three of her group of Filipino teachers landed in our little Cotulla school district.  When she got here, she was met by her cousin and her cousin’s family.  There was a Filipina woman and her young son in the Valley that also took an interest in helping her get settled in Texas.  All of these people… and all of their friends and relatives are still a part of our lives.  My wife’s sister and her family lived in California where dozens of cousins also lived.  They and my wife’s parents have since moved to Texas, along with two other sisters and their families.  You get the idea.  They are taking over.

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#2. As you can see, Filipinos love to take pictures.  Above is a picture from class where my niece goes to school back in Floridablanca in the Philippines.  People complain about pictures of food on Facebook.  My Filipino family puts the Food Network to shame.  Sometimes I can’t tell if they are eating another exotic Filipino dish with rice and meat or they’ve been putting firecrackers into fish and exploding them.  And the fish eyes are a delicacy.  Eeuw! My sisters in Iowa won’t even let me talk about the food at Filipino gatherings.  I have to be extremely careful of what I share on Facebook.

1013267_10201161984785458_2113452340_n #3.  To know about Filipino culture, you have to understand what Jollibee is all about.  Jollibee is the Filipino MacDonald’s.  Of course, it is cheaper… and better tasting.  There are a  few of them around the country here.  California has more than Texas.  They are like a giant Filipino magnet.  You go there to find the Filipino community in any American city.  But other people love the food too.  You have to sort the Filipinos from the Hispanics and white folks that are not too proud to eat cheap and delicious.

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Well, those are only about three things that you should probably know about Filipinos and Pinoy culture.  I haven’t even gotten into the thing about Matrilineal social orders or the evils of Karaoke addiction… but enough is enough for one day.  I have no idea how much trouble I am now in for revealing cultural secrets.  It could be a long cold night in the dog house.

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Poor Ol’ Wooden Head

“Kaw-Liga”
KAW-LIGA, was a wooden Indian standing by the door
He fell in love with an Indian maid over in the antique store
KAW-LIGA – A, just stood there and never let it show
So she could never answer “YES” or “NO”.

He always wore his Sunday feathers and held a tomahawk
The maiden wore her beads and braids and hoped someday he’d talk
KAW-LIGA – A, too stubborn to ever show a sign
Because his heart was made of knotty pine.

[Chorus:]
Poor ol’ KAW-LIGA, he never got a kiss
Poor ol’ KAW-LIGA, he don’t know what he missed
Is it any wonder that his face is red
KAW-LIGA, that poor ol’ wooden head.

KAW-LIGA, was a lonely Indian never went nowhere
His heart was set on the Indian maiden with the coal black hair
KAW-LIGA – A, just stood there and never let it show
So she could never answer “YES” or “NO”.

Then one day a wealthy customer bought the Indian maid
And took her, oh, so far away, but ol’ KAW-LIGA stayed
KAW-LIGA – A, just stands there as lonely as can be
And wishes he was still an old pine tree.

“The Complete Hank Williams” (1998)

Magicman 3

The quirky movie I reviewed, Moonrise Kingdom, reconnected me with a song I loved as a child.  It was on an old 45 record that belonged to my mother’s best friend from high school.  When the Retleffs sold their farm and tore down their house and barn, they had a huge estate sale.  My mother bought the old record player and all the collected records that Aunt Jenny still had.  They were the same ones my mother and her friend Edna had listened to over and over.  There were two records of singles about Indian love.  Running Bear was about an Indian boy who fell in love with little White Dove.  They lived on opposite sides of a river.  Overcome with love, they both jump into the river, swim to the middle, lock lips, and both drown.  Together forever.  That song, it turns out, was written by the Big Bopper, and given to Johnny Preston to sing, and released the year after the Big Bopper died in a plane crash along with Buddy Holly and Richie Valens.

Kaw-liga, by Hank Williams, was a wooden Indian sitting in front of a cigar store.  His love story is even worse.  As you can see from the lyrics above, he never even gets the girl.  Dang, Indian love must be heck!

But I have come to realize that these aren’t merely racist songs from a bygone era.  They hold within them a plea for something essential.  They are a reminder that we need love to be alive.

When I was young and deeply depressed… though also insufferably creative and unable to control the powers of my danged big brain, I knew that I wanted love.  There was one girl who went to school with me, lovely Alicia Stewart (I am not brave enough to use her real name), that filled my dreams.  We were classmates, and alphabetical seating charts routinely put us near each other.  She had a hypnotic sparkle in her eyes whenever she laughed at my jokes.  She was so sweet to me… sweet to everyone… that she probably caused my diabetes.  I longed to carry her books or hold her hand.  I cherished every time she spoke to me, and collected the memories like stamps in a stamp album.  But like the stupid cigar store Indian, I never spoke up for myself.  I never told her how I felt.  I was endlessly like Charlie Brown with the Little Red-Haired Girl.  Sometimes you have to screw up your courage and leap into the river, even if it means your undoing.  Because love is worth it.  Love is necessary.  And it comes to everybody in one way or another over time.  I look at pictures of her grandchildren posted on Facebook now, and wonder what might have been, if only… if only I had jumped in that stupid river.  I did find love.  And I probably would’ve drowned had I done it back then.  Life has a way of working things out eventually.  But there has to be some reason that in the 50’s, when I was born, they just kept singing about Indian love.

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What Dreams Will Reveal

Dorin, Me, My Wife, the Princess, and Henry

I respond to dreaming in ways that make sense in my stupid head, though the responses probably seem crazy to others.

The picture above was painted in oils in the early 1990’s before I met my wife. It was in response to a Bambi dream that seemed to be about my family as a family of deer. This was not about my family from childhood. It was, at the time, about my family in the future. Somehow I got it right. Two boys and a girl. Together for 30 years next month.

This picture is called, “The Boy Who Saw the Colors”,

Some pictures are dream images that can only be interpreted metaphorically. This one is about me being creative and artistical… or autistical as the case may be. It is also about being a synesthete with pronounced synesthesia.

This dream was a dream about being a Native American during a thunderstorm. It is called “the Magic-Man’s Daughter” because the Dakota Sioux tribe held the belief that dreams about lightning reveal you as a Shaman or Magic Man. Wakȟáŋ Tȟáŋka is the Lakotah word for “the Great Mystery”. That was a dream that sent me to the library to look things up.

I have dreams with clowns in them that are not nightmares. Here the clown known as Mr. Disney is encouraging me to sing sad songs.

I wrote an entire novel about that whopper of a dream.

This dream had me trapped in a tomb with a Mummy who wouldn’t stay in his nice warm sarcophagus.

It is not uncommon to dream about death and mortality. More than once I have dreamed about my own death. None of them have yet proved prophetic, but you never know.

I dreamed about my eldest son 14 years before he was born.

I think dreams can be prophetic because they are not bound by our perceptions of time in the physical universe. You can look ahead in a dream to that which has not yet happened. You can also look backward into the past beyond the boundary of your own birth. I often think some of my most vivid dreams are about peering into past lives and a very different me.

I know I sound crazy when I talk about my dreams. But they are a significant source for my artwork and creative endeavors. And dreams have a logic that doesn’t work by the rules of the world we know. Rather, it is a world of wonder.

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“They” Don’t Think Like “We” Do

Dumb Luck

I was recently asked how I can live surrounded by conservatives when I am obviously liberal-minded.  I hardly have to think about it to give an answer.

You have to realize that conservatives are people too.  To begin with, I hope you didn’t look at the picture I started with and think, “He must think all conservatives are stupid and look like that.”  The picture of Doofy Fuddbugg I used here is not about them.  It is about me.  This is the comedy face I wear when I am talking politics.  You live a life filled with economic, physical, and emotional pain like I have, you have a tendency to wear a mask that makes you, at the very least, happy on the outside.  People talk to me all the time, but not because I seek them out.  In social situations, I am not a bee, I’m a flower.  And because of my sense of humor, people feel comfortable seeking me out and telling me about their pain and anger and hurt to the point that they eventually reach the totally mistaken conclusion that I have wisdom to share.

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                                                                                                                                                           I do think that corporate bank CEO’s look like this, and I am not sure they count as people.

I hear lots of detailed complaints from my conservative friends in both Iowa and Texas.  I know what they fear and what makes them angry.  Here are a few of the key things;

  1. The world is no longer very much like the world I grew up in, and the changes make me afraid.
  2. I have worked hard all my life.  I’m still working hard.  For my father and mother that led to success and fulfillment.  For me it leads to a debt burden that’s hard to manage, and I am having to work hard for the rest of my life because of it.
  3. I’m not getting what I deserve out of life, and someone is to blame for that.  But who?  Minorities and immigrants seem to be getting ahead and getting whatever they want more than they ever used to.  It must be them.
  4. Liberals are all alike.  They want to tax and spend.  They don’t care about the consequences of trying out their high-fallutin’ ideas.  And they want me to pay for it all while they laugh at me and call me stupid and call me a racist.
  5. I am angry now, as angry as I have ever been in my life.  And someone has to hear me and feel my wrath.  Who better than these danged liberals?  And I can do that by voting in Trump.  Sure, I know how miserable he is as a human being, but he will make them suffer and pay.

I have always understood these feelings because I began hearing them repeatedly since the 1980’s.  They are like a fire-cracker with a very short fuse, these ideas conservatives live with.  And certain words you say to them are like matches.  They will set off, not just one, but all of the fireworks.

So, here is how I talk to conservatives.

  1. Never treat them as stupid people.  Conservatives are sometimes just as smart as I am, if not smarter.  I complement them on what they say that I think is a really good idea.  I point out areas of agreement whenever possible, even if they are rare sometimes.
  2. I defend what I believe in, but I try to understand what they believe and why.
  3. I am open about the doubts and questioning I have about my own positions on things, encouraging them to do the same.
  4. I always try to remember that we really have more in common than we have differences.  I try to point that out frequently too.  This point in particular helps them to think of me as being smarter than I really am.
  5. And if I haven’t convinced them that I am right, which, admittedly is impossible, that doesn’t mean I have lost the argument.  In fact, if I have made them feel good about actually listening calmly to a liberal point of view and then rejecting it as total liberal claptrap, I win, because I have been listened to.

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